Read this

The financing was led by DFJ Growth, and also includes money from existing backers Battery Ventures, Genesis Partners and Opus Capital. "Customers rave about SiSense and its ability to easily integrate multiple data sources, scale beyond competitive solutions, and be adopted directly by business users with little to no support needed from IT specialists," said Randy Glein, managing director of DFJ Growth, in a statement.

With the addition of this new round, the company has raised $50 million.

SiSense 5 (released earlier this year) is a dashboard that allows users to create and customize analytics reports based on data from multiple sources, including internal applications and sources across a company's cloud services. The company's big pitch is that you don't have to be a programmer to assemble those reports. "You can do what used to only be achieved by a data warehouse," said Eldad Farkash, co-founder and CTO of the company.

The company realized "from day one" that the way to distinguish itself from other players in the business intelligence and analytics category, it needed to focus on making setup simpler and on accommodating a broader array of data sources, Farkash said. "The first unusual thing is that it combines both database and dashboarding," he said. "It allows you to join tables and fields from many places. It's not just about scaling, it's about mashing up the models."

SiSense counts Target, eBay, ESPN, Samsung and Wix among its high-profile customers (it has more than 500 altogether), but the core of its accounts can be found among midsize businesses.

One example is marketing automation technology company Act-On Software, which uses SiSense to create a "single source of truth" for collecting metrics from data sitting everywhere, said James Levine, business analyst for the company.

Among other things, Act-On uses SiSense to track information such as customer support interactions that helps it better understand customer churn and provide insight about which accounts might be at risk.

"It has given me a form of predictive analytics. I'm able to identify something before that something happens," Levine said.

SiSense doesn't disclose pricing on its Web site, but its basic plan is targeted at fewer than 10 users.

Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist specializing in transformative technology and innovation. Her articles have appeared in Entrepreneur, Fortune Small Business, The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. In a past corporate life, Heather was editor of Computer Reseller News. She started her journalism lif...
Full Bio

Disclosure

I am fascinated about how businesses of all sizes can transform their operations through technology -- not just to make themselves more efficient, but to rise above their competitors. That's the theme for my two ZDNet blogs, Small Business Matters and Next-Gen Partner. For SmartPlanet, I'm focused on profiling inspirational and controversial business leaders who have great leadership lessons to share. I also write regularly and passionately about corporate social responsibility and sustainability issues for GreenBiz.com.
Occasionally, I will pop up at an industry conference in some sort of speaking capacity. In cases where an engagement involves a sponsor that may be covered in this blog, that fact will be disclosed in coverage as appropriate.
My corporate writing work usually consists of crafting research white papers about some aspect of technology or moderating Webcasts. In the event that my commentary (in written, audio or video form) mentions a company for which I have provided consulting advice, I will disclose that fact. However, there is no connection between these projects and topics that I cover in my blogs.